Justices add case on union fees to docket
WASHINGTON — Its conservative majority restored, the Supreme Court said Thursday it will return to an issue with the potential to financially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.
After the justices deadlocked 4-4 in a similar case last year, the high court will consider a free-speech challenge from workers who object to paying money to unions they don’t support.
The court, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch on board, could decide to overturn a 40year-old Supreme Court ruling that allows publicsector unions to collect fees from nonmembers to cover the costs of negotiating contracts for all employees.
The union fees case is among nine cases the justices added to their docket for the term that begins Monday.
Unions have been under attack at the high court in recent years. The latest appeal is from a state employee in Illinois. It was filed at the Supreme Court two months after Gorsuch filled the high court seat that had been vacant since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.
The stakes are high. Union membership in the U.S. declined to 10.7 percent of the workforce last year, and private-sector unions have been especially hard hit.
About half of all union members now work for federal, state and local governments, and many are in Illinois, New York and California, which are largely Democratic and seen as friendly toward unions.
Labor leaders criticized the court for taking up the case. “This case is yet another example of corporate interests using their power and influence to launch a political attack on working people and rig the rules of the economy in their own favor,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
But National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix said the court was poised to protect employees’ rights.
“With the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Janus case, we are now one step closer to freeing over 5 million publicsector teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other employees from the injustice of being forced to subsidize a union as a condition of working for their own government,” Mix said.
The Illinois case involves Mark Janus, a state employee who says Illinois law violates his free speech rights by requiring him to pay fees to subsidize AFSCME.
Scalia died in February 2016, just a month after the justices heard a similar case from California. The court seemed ready to overrule the 1977 case, and the 4-4 tie the court announced in March of that year almost certainly meant that Scalia, not typically a friend of unions in high court cases, would have been part of the majority ruling against them.